An English Dialects app developed by University of Cambridge researchers
guesses what part of the country you're from

Do you pronounce "scone" so it rhymes with "gone" or "cone"? Is summer followed by autumn or backend? Is the "a" in "last" long or short?

England has always been teeming with different dialects and pronunciations, but now Cambridge researchers are trying to pinpoint where in the country your accent would most fit in.

They have developed an app that attempts to guess where in England users are from, based on a series of 26 multiple-choice questions.

For example, you can pick four pronunciations of "bacon" to see which one mirrors your own most closely, and pick one of ten words for "a small piece of wood stuck under the skin", from splinter to spile to sliver.

The app will then match your answers with areas of the country associated with that word or pronunciation, and generate a heat map of an area to estimate where in England you are from.

These three different pronunciations of "shelf", for example, correspond to the parts of the country shown in the image.

When going through the app's questions, you are not shown where each pronunciation comes from, but simply have to pick the one you recognise the most.

Dr Adrian Leeman, who used a previous version of the app to map German-speaking parts of the world, said decoding England's smorgasbord of regional colloquialisms and dialects presented more of a challenge.

"English accents and dialects are likely to have changed over the past decades," Dr Leeman said. "This may be due to geographical and social mobility, the spread of the mass media and other factors. If the app guesses where you are from correctly, then the accent or dialect of your region has not changed much in the last century. If the app does not guess correctly, it is probably because the dialect spoken in your region has changed quite a lot over time."

As an example of this, the app guessed that I was from Belchamp Walter in Essex, more than 100 miles from my Warwickshire hometown. The researchers' app allows users to enter information such as age, gender, education and how often they have moved in order to build up a more detailed history of English dialects.

The app's results screen

As for the contentious question of how exactly you should pronounce "scone", the app is yet to build up enough data to map which parts of the country should use which pronunciation.